Inmate to be freed after 23 years

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office announced Wednesday that it will not retry a man whose 23-year-old murder conviction was overturned last week after a judge found that the key prosecution witness had lied.

The decision paves the way for the release of Willie Earl Green at a court hearing today.

Green, 55, has maintained that he was wrongly convicted of the 1983 slaying of a woman at a crack house in South Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stephen A. Marcus found that Green did not receive a fair trial because jurors were never given information that probably would have undermined the credibility of the only witness who identified Green as one of two men responsible for the killing.

The witness, Willie Finley, recently recanted his trial testimony, saying he was high on cocaine during the killing and had been helped by police to identify Green as a suspect.

Among other problems, Marcus found that detectives had improperly tainted the identification process by telling Finley that Green had previously been convicted of stealing from the victim.

Prosecutors said Wednesday that they would not appeal the ruling or oppose a motion by Green’s attorneys to release him. A district attorney’s spokeswoman said the office would not comment until Thursday’s hearing.

The decision not to retry the case followed a phone call made by a top district attorney’s official to the victim’s daughter early Wednesday.

Lakiesha Matthews, who was 5 years old when her mother, Denise “Dee Dee” Walker, was fatally shot, said the official told her that prosecutors still believed Green was guilty but could not prosecute the case after Finley’s recantation.

Matthews said she was too young at the time of the killing to have an opinion about the evidence in the case. But she said she grew up knowing that her grandmother -- the victim’s mother -- had met Green and always harbored doubts about the conviction.

“I think they should let him out,” Matthews said. “If he didn’t do it, good for him. Start your life. If he really had something to do with it, we’ll never know, but God will take care of it.”

Green’s attorney, Peter A. Camiel, said he visited his client in county jail Wednesday to break the news. Green was speechless at first and then began sobbing, he said.

“For a few minutes, he really let it out. He was quite emotional,” Camiel said. “He told me he knew this day would come.”

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jack.leonard@latimes.com